Mental Ageing
Which factors through the course of life promote
and protect cognitive capability and which increase vulnerability
to decline?
Research programme: Mental Ageing
Programme leader: Professor Marcus Richards
MRC studentship: Dorina
Cadar
Other LHA senior scientists: Dr Rebecca Hardy, Professor Diana Kuh, Dr
Mai Stafford
External collaborators:
- For collaborators on this programme please click here
This programme brings a life course approach
to bear on maintaining quality of later life through promoting
cognitive capability and reducing risk of depression. The essence
of this approach is to map life course determinants and
consequences of cognition and affect; their associations with each
other, and their associations with other aspects of health and
function through common and sequential causes. In most parts of the
world older people account for the fastest-growing proportion of
the population, with huge corresponding increases in the absolute
prevalence of dementia - a trend that is projected to continue well
into the future. In addition the World Health Organization has
identified depression as the leading cause of disease burden in
middle and high income countries. The long-term priorities of this
programme are therefore to reduce the risk of these outcomes using
a life course approach across all levels of explanation: from
societal opportunities and barriers, through behavioural choices,
to underlying biological regulation from genes, endocrine systems,
inflammatory mechanisms, and autonomic control.
Main objectives for 2013-2018
The fundamental goals of the Mental Ageing
programme, over the next five years and in the much longer term,
are to identify how to optimise cognitive function and reduce risk
of depression in later life through a life course approach; and to
study how abnormal mental ageing impacts on other aspects of health
and function. This will be done within three closely inter-related
Themes:
- Capturing mental ageing, focusing on life course trajectories
of cognitive function and mental health and the ascertainment of
clinically significant cognitive decline, neurodegeneration, and
affective disorder;
- Maintaining mental capability in early old age, emphasising
education, work and retirement, and self-management of health;
- Integration of mental and physical ageing, investigating links
between cognitive capability and common mental disorder, and
between these entities and aspects of physical health:
cardio-respiratory, metabolic, musculoskeletal; and ultimately
survival.
Top five publications 2007-2012:
Hatch SL, Feinstein L, Link B, Wadsworth MEJ, Richards
M. The continuing benefits of education:
adult education and midlife cognitive ability in the British 1946
birth cohort. Journal of Gerontology Series B 2007, 62,
S404-S414.
This study suggests an important choice of an activity that
maintains cognitive capability. It also reinforces our previous
evidence that education has a causal effect on cognitive
capability, since the association between the two was independent
of prior cognition and education, and of any social mobility that
may have arisen as a result of continuing education.
Murray GK, Jones PB, Kuh D, Richards M. Infant developmental milestones and subsequent
cognitive function. Annals of Neurology 2007, 62,
128-136.
This paper was one of the first studies to show an inverse
association between postnatal neurodevelopment, indicated by age at
motor milestone attainment, and cognitive development.
Richards M, Power C, Sacker A. Paths to literacy and numeracy problems: evidence
from two British birth cohorts. Journal of Epidemiology and
Community Health 2009, 63, 239-244.
Extending the path model of Richards & Sacker, linking
paternal SEP to midlife cognitive capability in NSHD, the above
study shows a stronger protective path from education to functional
literacy and numeracy in the British 1958 cohort than in NSHD,
almost certainly resulting from raising the school leaving age by
one year in the intervening 12 years.
Richards M, Brayne C. What do we
mean by Alzheimer’s disease? British Medical Journal 2010,
341(no. 7778), 865-867.
This invited analysis paper challenges the pathology-led model
of Alzheimer’s disease, and argues that, in older age groups, this
disease is a diffuse clinical syndrome representing the gradual
accumulation of multiple pathologies, arising from multiple
interlocking risk factors over the life course.
Byford M, Kuh D, Richards M. Parenting practices and intergenerational
associations in cognitive ability. Evidence from two generations of
a British birth cohort. International Journal of
Epidemiology 2012, 41, 263-72.
This study
exploits the rare availability of data based on three generations
and provides evidence that parenting styles have effects on
cognitive development that are independent of grandparental SEP,
parental cognitive capability and mental health, parental
educational attainment and SEP, and offspring behavioural
characteristics.
For a full list of publications please click here.